Diana Quick, Margi Clarke, Vanessa Redgrave and others.

The day I became a feminist was when I was refused social security benefits on the grounds that I had a husband who would keep me.

I am sick of hearing the word post-feminism. This is not a post-feminist era, we don’t have equal pay, the streets are not safe for women, and we still have to juggle our lives. The battle will not even begin to be won until boys start asking how they can combine their work and their family life. As for younger women, take up the cudgels and bring the boys along with you!

Anna Ford, broadcast journalist

The aim of my sort of feminism is to make sure that every woman has the opportunity to realise her chosen potential without harassment or discrimination and stands up for women who are still referred to as deserving minority groups. Women in America find our continues emphasis on such basic rights and recognition almost impossible to believe. What we still have to achieve, they have taken for granted for 20 years.

Claire Rayney, broadcaster and writer

Feminism means everything if you care at all about people, if you care about women. I’m concerned about women’s status and women’s rights and women’s needs, because until they are satisfied, neither are the needs of men and children. I never lie about my age; it’s a very anti-feminist thing to do. Expecting women to be coy about their ages, and colluding in it, implies women are only interesting when they’re fizzy with oestrogen. I’m 60 and splendid.

Julie Burchill, newspaper columnist

Feminism means being able to do what you want.

Diana Quick, actor

Feminism has had a lasting impact on my life. What has helped me most are de Beauvoir’s ideas about not authenticating yourself in terms of other people’s reactions to you, but doing things on your own account. The thing that bothers me most today is the unequal burden of domestic labour. But when people ask me if I am a feminist, I say, no, I’m a working woman; partly out of cowardice, but also our of irritation at having to meet up with those set of prejudices that the tag now implies.

Feminism? I personally don’t care for it. I like the elegance and flattery of being a woman but it hasn’t prevented me from doing things that some women might wait for the man of the house to do. I know what I want to do and I get on with it. There may be barriers in society but it’s up to women to break them down.

Margi Clarke, actor

Feminism is belonging to the earth and being in rhythm with feminine forces; and any man who doesn’t understand feminism will come back with a cunt next time.

Zeinab Badawi, newsreader

Feminism is the freedom to choose. I work and I always will, but my mother would say she is a professional mother. We are in a post-feminist era. Discrimination is not embarrassing for the perpetrator, whereas a few years ago their assumptions would have gone unchallenged.

I am wary of the feminist label because it can lead to western cultural chauvinism. What I may define as my freedom may not be what my counterparts in Khartoum would want.

Patsy Chapman, editor, “News of the World”

Building society managers used to turn women down, including me, in case they got pregnant. And an editor once refused me a job when he learned I was married – because I would have to be home at six to put the potatoes on.

Sara Parkin, national speaker, the Green Party

I’ve been most inspired by third world women who could not be described as feminists, like Wanjari Maatti, the Kenyan who founded the Green Belt movement or Vandana Shive one of the Indian women who set up their own bank.